ARQA Technologies: results of 2022

The last year challenged the whole financial market IT industry, changed standard working methods, forced to look for new solutions and approaches to implementation of the plans. Throughout the year, ARQA Technologies closely worked with their clients, actively participated in meetings of the Bank of Russia with key vendors of the financial industry, working group meetings of NAUFOR and RUSSOFT. This allowed the company to be at the cutting edge of ongoing changes, make suggestions, obtain advice, and as soon as possible to integrate into new business realities, and continue the development of software products, and provide services of a high quality standard.

Clients

In 2022, 25 organizations including banks, exchanges, investment and asset management companies became new clients of ARQA Technologies. Seventeen of them implemented QUIK software, and ten — solutions based on the QORT software platform. The trend of the year was a large number of installations of software provided from ARQA Technologies data centers.

QUIK Complex

Projects

In 2022, the company continued to register its software solutions in the Unified Register of Russian Programs for Electronic Computers and Databases. This was made possible because the QUIK server software and server modules supported the work with DBMS PostgreSQL. During the year, information on 26 QUIK modules was entered in the Register.

Due to changes in the current business model of professional participants, QUIK system configurations were optimized for a number of clients of ARQA Technologies. Also, an audit was carried out for a big client’s complex trading infrastructure built with the use of a wide range of the company’s software. As a result of the project, the client has got a clear understanding of how to optimize the infrastructure and instructional advice on eliminating bottlenecks and improving reliability.

Besides that, last year QUIK software was installed as a key part (matching core) of one exchange venue's technological platform.

The project on the video library about the QUIK system capabilities was further developed. Five new videos were published on the website and YouTube channel of ARQA Technologies.

Server Modules

Trading Interfaces

Other notable innovations in the company’s Trading interfaces include support of the work with new currencies and near abroad markets:

• Moscow Exchange FX Market trading interface – South African rand, UAE dirham, Uzbekistan sum, Armenian dram trading,
• Moscow Exchange Securities Market (Main Market Sector) trading interface – trading modes with settlements in CNY and HKD,
• SPB Exchange trading interface (Foreign securities market) – the work with instruments of Kazakhstan issuers.

Business Solutions

Due to the exit of major foreign OTC trading systems from the Russian market, ARQA Technologies in 2022 launched QDealing, its own service to agree on terms of OTC trades with interbroker chats. The service was connected to the electronic trading platform SberTrade to transmit to QDealing firm quotes of the biggest OTC liquidity pool from Sberbank and its counterparties.

Infrastructure Solutions

An important improvement in the functionality of QUIK OMS last year was discontinuation of use of the Broker quotation system for execution of OTC and booking trades. OTC and FX trades as well as booking trades are now executed in the system itself. Besides that, QUIK OMS was included in the ‘Buyer’s Guide: Sellside Cash Equities OEMS 2022’ report by Greyspark which reviews the most advanced OMS solutions of the market.

Server

One of the most important improvements the QUIK server software was a possibility to start the server in the position rolling mode. When using this mode, the QUIK server automatically rolls over client positions from the previous trading day to the current one.

As part of support for the mechanism being implemented on the Russian Securities market to test unqualified investors, it became possible to set restrictions on transactions with certain types of financial instruments for unqualified investors by using the profile of complex financial instruments, set in the ‘leverage’ parameter.

Also, the server software acquired a new role-based model which provides permissions to users. And when setting user two-factor authentication in the QUIK Administrator user rights’ editor, it become possible to choose one of the cases to use it: when logging in or executing a trade operation.

User Terminals

Last year, 6 updates of QUIK workstation were released. The most prominent innovations of the desktop terminal were a possibility to specify a position WAP currency when setting position for instrument and the ‘Display clients in portfolio’ setting added to allow optimizing the terminal work in case of a large number of rows in the ‘Client portfolio’ table. Moreover, changes were made in the entry dialog box and operating procedure for program file storages.

A number of significant improvements were made in the web-terminal QUIK. The webQUIK workstation supports a new type of non-trade instructions to transfer securities from one account to another, a possibility to register orders in the Bookbuilding module, and new options to work with charts. Besides that, in webQUIK brokers acquired expanded options to set a color scheme in order to change the appearance of windows in the web-terminal. Operation support was provided for Yandex Browser.

Mobile terminals iQUIK X and QUIK Android X acquired improved ergonomics to display graphs and work with them. New options allow viewing a transaction history for any period of time, displaying a portfolio in any currency, viewing news related to the instrument with their display on the instrument’s screen, setting the ‘Trading authentication’ authorization scenario. Also, a link to tutorial videos was added in the mobile terminals.